On my team, there's been a bit of a disagreement over how to promote ourselves on campus. Some of us (myself included) think that describing quiz bowl as "trivia" undersells it's serious academic nature and may turn off a lot of potential players who would otherwise be good at it. Others feel that it connects quiz bowl to something that people are already familiar with and may make it easier to recruit.

At Toronto we're registered as the "Academic Trivia Club" and promote ourselves as such at the annual clubs fair, where last year we got around 100 signups, so it seems to be working for us. That said, a lot of our interest does come from people who played Reach for the Top, which is incontrovertibly trivia, unlike Quizbowl.

"Academic Trivia" should be a good compromise that leaves all semantic extremists unhappy and makes your activity understandable to the general population. If people ask "what's academic trivia?" you can reply "you know, stuff about history, literature, science, art, mythology, etc."

Anyone who would get offended by that is probably already on your team.

"Academic trivia" sounds great. I was mainly worried about the ridges-on-a-coin/random-batting-averages questions that people associate with trivia, and it seems like "academic trivia" will avoid all that. Thanks!

The Assoluta Voice in Opera, 1797-1847 wrote:At Toronto we're registered as the "Academic Trivia Club" and promote ourselves as such at the annual clubs fair, where last year we got around 100 signups, so it seems to be working for us. That said, a lot of our interest does come from people who played Reach for the Top, which is incontrovertibly trivia, unlike Quizbowl.

No -- we advertise ourselves as "quizbowl" at clubs fair along with some sample questions from some old novice-level set or other. However, we are listed on the school's clubs listing as "Academic Trivia Club". I would change this name if I could, as I've found that it tends to mislead people who don't already know what quizbowl is/didn't visit us at clubs fair and instead email me or something, attracting people who think we do things like watch Jeopardy or play Trivial Pursuit (not that there's anything wrong with that!) rather than, well, play quizbowl. So they show up to one meeting, are inevitably overwhelmed, and it ends up being kind of a waste of everyone's time. So I've found "Quizbowl" to be a more effective name.

Meghan TorchiaPresident, University of Toronto Academic Trivia Club University of Toronto, 2017 + CBY